The Acts of the Apostles 11:1-18 [NLTse]

Soon the news reached the apostles and other believers in Judea that the Gentiles had received the Word of God. ² But when Peter arrived back in Jerusalem, the Jewish believers criticized him. ³ “You entered the home of Gentiles and even ate with them!” they said.

⁴ Then Peter told them exactly what had happened. ⁵ “I was in the town of Joppa,” he said, “and while I was praying, I went into a trance and saw a vision. Something like a large sheet was let down by its four corners from the sky. And it came right down to me. ⁶ When I looked inside the sheet, I saw all sorts of tame and wild animals, reptiles, and birds. ⁷ And I heard a voice say, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat them.’

⁸ “‘No, Lord,’ I replied. ‘I have never eaten anything that our Jewish laws have declared impure or unclean.’

⁹ “But the voice from Heaven spoke again: ‘Do not call something unclean if God has made it clean.’ ¹⁰ This happened three times before the sheet and all it contained was pulled back up to Heaven.

¹¹ “Just then three men who had been sent from Caesarea arrived at the house where we were staying. ¹² The Holy Spirit told me to go with them and not to worry that they were Gentiles. These six brothers here accompanied me, and we soon entered the home of the man who had sent for us. ¹³ He told us how an angel had appeared to him in his home and had told him, ‘Send messengers to Joppa, and summon a man named Simon Peter. ¹⁴ He will tell you how you and everyone in your household can be saved!’

¹⁵ “As I began to speak,” Peter continued, “the Holy Spirit fell on them, just as He fell on us at the beginning. ¹⁶ Then I thought of the Lord’s words when He said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ ¹⁷ And since God gave these Gentiles the same gift He gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to stand in God’s way?”

¹⁸ When the others heard this, they stopped objecting and began praising God. They said, “We can see that God has also given the Gentiles the privilege of repenting of their sins and receiving eternal life.”

Sermon

The book of Acts is many things. It’s a history of the early Church. It’s a record of the acts of the apostles. It’s a record of the acts of the Holy Spirit through those apostles. But, as I was reading it this week (along with many of you) with Valentine’s Day in mind, I realized that the book of Acts is also a love story.

Acts is the love story of the Apostle Paul, who begins the book as an enemy – a persecutor of Jesus and His Church, but who ends the book as a lover of Jesus, and imprisoned for all the ways he has lived out His love and His faith in His one beloved.

If you’ve been reading the New Testament with me this year, last week we met Paul when he was still called by his Hebrew name, Saul, where we saw him holding the coats of several of the men stoning one of the Churches first deacons, Stephen, to death. We then see Saul (Paul) leading a great persecution against the Church, hunting down Christians who were then imprisoned for their faith by the Jewish authorities.

After much success in Jerusalem, Saul (Paul) seeks their authority to go to the neighboring city of Damascus to seek out any Christians there, and to bring them back to Jerusalem in chains.

He is given that authority, but on the way Jesus meets him on the road to Damascus, striking Saul (Paul) blind, and committing to Saul (Paul) that He, Jesus, loved him and that He wanted Saul (Paul) to love Him back, and to join His gospel-team spreading the Kingdom of God across the earth.

And as we continue to read, we see that Saul (Paul) did indeed fall in love with Jesus, recognizing Jesus to be the God he has loved and trusted his entire life. And Saul (Paul) commits to the Lord and covenants his life to Him in baptism, and then does join Jesus’ team spreading the Kingdom of God.

From then on, across Acts, we see recorded the love of God for a man and the love of a man for his God as (now just) Paul declares His love for Jesus over and over and over again, makes his beloved known to any and all who will listen, and makes sacrifice after sacrifice for his loved one because so many were deciding again and again to reject God’s Kingdom and to refuse His love that Paul was preaching.

It all got me thinking about what I have learned about love across twenty-five years of marriage to my wife, Amy, and across twenty-two or twenty-three years of living in covenant-relationship with our God and Father through faith and love for Jesus Christ as the Holy Spirit has wooed and nurtured me in such faith and love. (I know that twenty-five years of marriage may seem like a drop in the bucket to many of you. Who’s been married here for at least twenty-five years? Anybody thirty years? Thirty-five? Forty? Do I hear forty-five? Fifty? Anybody here been married for more than fifty years? … And I know that many of you have walked with the Lord for far more than twenty-two or twenty-three years. But let me share with you what I’ve learned.)

Well, the first thing I’ve learned about love from across my studies given flesh in my experiences is that when you truly love someone you want everyone to know that you love them. A second thing about love that is embodied in Jesus, that I see in Paul’s life, and that I have experienced in my own life loving Amy and the Lord has been that you only truly love people when you love them the way they were made to be loved, not when you merely love them the ways that you want to love them. And, lastly, across the Scripture and Acts and across my love-relationships with my God and my wife, I’ve learned that love requires sacrifice because making our love and those we love known to those around us has consequences, and loving our beloveds the ways they want to be loved and were made to be loved isn’t always easy, convenient, or pleasant. But we need to be willing to make those sacrifices and suffer those sacrifices for the sake of love.

So, the first thing about loving another is wanting everyone around you to know your beloved and to know that you love your beloved. And we see this in Paul’s life: The Book of Acts relates that everywhere that Paul went and everything he did eventually led to Paul telling those around him about the Lord Jesus and His good news. Everywhere. Everything. That Paul’s heart was always and everywhere looking for ways to share his Beloved with others.

Wedding rings are a part of doing that for married couples in our day. Wearing a wedding ring, ideally, sends a message to the whole watching world that we are married, we are taken, and because I’m making it so publicly known, please feel free to ask me about my beloved. And, of course, people often put pictures of their family members on their desks or cash registers at work, or carry pictures in their wallets or on their phones. When we’re in love we can’t help but want to let everyone around us in on it. It’s just what true love does!

And yet, I know some people who never speak about their wives or their husbands – no ring, no pictures – almost as though they want to keep their marriages – their loves – a secret; like they want to keep their options open, just in case. But that’s not commitment. That’s not being all-in. That’s not love…

The second thing I mentioned as having learned about love is that true love is about loving people the way they want to be loved and were made to be loved, not just loving them the way we want or have come to enjoy loving them. The Bible is the greatest example of this.

The Lord of Heaven and Earth, our Father, has spoken through all manner of prophets, priests, kings, and apostles to reveal to humanity across the generations what true love looks like and how He wants to be loved. The Lord Jesus says, “If you love Me, obey My commandments.” God doesn’t want to be loved on our terms. He wants to be loved on His. And make no mistake, Almighty God our Father and Savior makes absolutely clear that if we are not loving Him the way He has called and laid out for us to love Him in His Word then we are not loving Him! (No matter how warm and fuzzy we might feel.) And the same is true for those around us.

I am a touchy-feely kind of love-r. I like to show love by hugging and handshaking, holding hands and kissing, and by speaking words of affection and encouragement and affirmation. But my beloved, my wife, Amy, is different. Don’t get me wrong, Amy will give you a hug or shake your hand and say kind words to you, but that’s not her primary love language, it’s not the way she most readily shows love and it’s not the way she wants for me to show her love. To show Amy I love her I need to stop drinking soda, and I need to finish painting the bathroom, and to work out, and to finish some of the other projects we have going around the house. That’s how she likes to be loved.

[Holding up the Bible.] Just as the Lord has let me know how He wants us to love Him, Amy has let me know how she wants me to love her. And if, in my love for her, I want to let her know my love, that is the way I’m going to have to show it to her: Not the ways I want to love her but the ways she wants to be loved.

Lastly, true love requires sacrifice, because letting everyone around you know that you love God or that you love your wife or your family or your friends, will always have consequences: Sometimes good consequences; sometimes bad consequences. And, of course, loving others the ways they want to be loved – whether it’s the Lord, a spouse, our kids or our parents, or various friends or even strangers – can be a challenge when they prove to be different from us and when their needs for love are difficult or inconvenient to us…

And yet we are called by our Almighty Father to love Him, and He calls us to love others as a way of showing off to the world our love for Him.

When I first married Amy I thought that marriage and my love for her and her love for me was all about me and my being happy. Likewise, many Christians believe that when their sins have been forgiven and they enter into relationship with God through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, that everything in their lives is going to change and be wonderful: Their see relationship with God as being all about them and about God making them happy.

Well, call me a slow learner, but after all these years I have come to realize that God’s given me my different relationships and the different opportunities I have to love others – not to merely make me happy. No. God wants to use my marriage and my other relationships and choices to help me love Him better, to help me love my wife, Amy, better, and to help me love others and all those around me better. Whether or not Amy and those others around me are going to grow in loving me better is between them and the Lord. But He wants to use the situations and relationships across my life, not to have me be happy but to have me love better. Because He’s shown me that loving Him and loving others better is what will truly make me and you and everyone in the world – if folks would just love and trust Him – happy.